The Return of Vordul Mega, Underground Rap’s Missing Link
As a member of Cannibal Ox, Vordul Mega was one of the most adventurous rappers of the 2000s—until he all but disappeared. After nearly two decades of struggle, he's back to claim his legacy.
It’s toasty inside the Brooklyn venue Elsewhere one night in February, when I see something I’d accepted as an impossibility for the past couple of decades: Vordul Mega of Cannibal Ox pacing across the stage, with a mic and a wide smile. In a booming voice, the 47-year-old declares, “It’s real good energy tonight!” over the opening synth stabs of “Iron Galaxy,” the first song on his former group’s 2001 classic, The Cold Vein. “We got some real lyricists tonight—excluding myself. I’m an amateur, but I appreciate y’all.” I hear a few people suck their teeth in disbelief at such genuine humility. This is the man who helped spearhead an abstract style—part intergalactic poet, part street documentarian—that inspired many other rap experimentalists, including underground kingpin Billy Woods. Who shied away from the glare of notoriety, and then went silent. Who seemed to vanish, even though he was still with us. At the show, when Vordul gets to his indelible thesis on “Iron Galaxy,” he hollers it with full force: “Life’s ill/Sometimes, life might kill.” The diehards rap along, hands in the air, faces beaming, but no one seems happier than Vordul himself. This is the latest in a string of shows he’s been playing around New York over the past year, the first solo performances of his career.
Twenty-five years ago, with The Cold Vein, Vordul and his Cannibal Ox partner Vast Aire changed the course of independent rap by envisioning New York as a cluster of arterial malformations cast in concrete and metal; corners littered with blunt guts, broken 40 bottles, and police-issue bullet casings; grey pavement under a greyer sky. Produced entirely by Def Jux founder El-P, it was chilly and dystopian, the apotheosis of the pioneering label’s clattering sound. Less than six months after its release, the Twin Towers crumbled into Lower Manhattan, but The Cold Vein already soundtracked a post-9/11 world. Then Vordul succumbed to that world. Drugs. Prison. Depression. Now he’s back to reclaim his own history.
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